A good overview of the hardware, software and the vision that powers the OLPC Laptop named XO. As the author says, XO pushes laptop technology to a higher level of harware and software excellence.

…development tools bundled with Sugar include the simple Scratch environment all the way to Python. Or that the music creation tools go from the simple but fun TamTam music box to cSounds, an advanced sound programming language used in Hollywood.

Also, while I was at the OLPC offices I saw a number of developers working on new and interesting applications and games for Sugar. These included an advanced calculator that handled a number of functions, including word-based calculations, and a customizable matching game useful for classroom quizzes.

One of the cooler applications was one that took the microphone from the XO and used it as an analog data port, essentially turning the XO into an oscilloscope. Given the places it will be deployed, this could turn out to be an extremely valuable customization of the XO.